Takami Jun

Takami Jun

(pen name of Yoshio Takama). Born Feb. 18, 1907, in Fukui Prefecture, on the island of Honshu; died Aug. 17, 1965, in Chiba. Japanese writer and critic.

Takami graduated from the English division of the University of Tokyo in 1930. In the 1930’s he participated briefly in the movement for a proletarian literature. He gained fame with the novel Old Friends Are Forgotten (1936), which portrayed former leftists who had renounced Marxism during the triumph of reaction. The novel Under Which Stars! (1940), written in the form of a free-and-easy conversation, depicted the mores of Tokyo’s red-light districts.

After World War II (1939–45), Takami became associated with the futurist poetry journal Nihon mirai ha and published the poetry collection Love for a Tree (1960). The novel Disgust (1960) portrayed an anarchist Japanese intellectual. Takami also wrote a number of studies on contemporary Japanese literature, including The Flowering and Decline of the Literature of the Showa Period (1958).

In his account of the metamorphosis of Tokyo through the disaster of the earthquake and the catastrophe of the American air raids in 1945, Seiden-sticker deliberately has chosen to adopt an impressionistic and anecdotal style, documenting the social and physical changes of the city by perceptive passages from the writings of Kawabata, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Takami Jun, and most notably, Kafu.

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